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The Struggle for Civil Rights: Emancipation

Emancipation was a slow process, with its origins in African American resistance across the centuries and its conclusion in the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery in 1865. President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, which declared enslaved people in rebelling territories free, became the symbolic turning point in American memory. These relics and memorials illustrate how African American activists supported the work of emancipation and the president who was its symbol.